Making insurance matter

We live in an age where veg boxes and personalised beauty products can be delivered to your door, and household items can be controlled with simple voice commands.

With so many flashy products and services vying for consumers’ attention, it can be hard to communicate the relevance of protecting your assets or planning for the future.

Finance institutions have to work hard to compete with the immediate ‘feel-good’ factor provided by these new products.

But does that have to be the case? This summer, Lloyds Bank Home Insurance took on the challenge of bringing to life the importance of insurance in a way that captured consumers’ imaginations.

It started with an insight: despite the modern obsession with decluttering and digital, physical possessions continue to exert an emotional power over people.

Our survey found that a quarter of Britons are holding onto a whopping nine (or more) box loads of sentimental ‘stuff’.

Yet, despite the ongoing obsession with sentimental belongings, 24% of people don’t take any steps to protect these precious belongings, and a further 14% don’t have home insurance.

With this in mind, we wanted to remind people of the unique and varied treasures they hold most dear, whether this is a pair of ballet pumps, love letters or a vinyl record collection.

This formed the cornerstone of our partnership with celebrated photographer Paula Zuccotti.

Her mission? To capture visual biographies of people from around the UK, using their most treasured items to bring to life the way in which our stories are inextricably linked with our possessions.

The resulting photo series profiled eight people, with 80 years between the youngest and oldest subjects. Their stories are as unique as their objects.

For example, Andy (44) has been collecting records for thirty five years, having inherited his love of music from his dad.

His most treasured albums are Alice Coltrane’s World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane and Livy Ekemezie’s Friday Night. He says he could plot his life with the music in his collection and plays these records to remind him of people, places and things.

At 37, Natalie’s most precious possessions trace the relationship between her and her husband, from meeting and becoming best friends at school in 1997 to the present day.

She kept all of their love letters, spanning 20 years, and is thankful that they met before the digital age as she now has this written record of their love story.

Then there’s Sid and Ossie, who are 13 and 11. They’re big sport fans, and prize their many football trophies from their days playing for Charlton Athletics’ youth team.

As they’ve grown up, another sport has captured their imagination. The boys are lucky to count a pair of boxing gloves – one left and one right, to match their own handedness – signed by the heavyweight champion of the world, Anthony Joshua (pictured), among their possessions.

The gift has inspired them so much that they’ve joined a gym to be like their hero!

The photographs have sparked a conversation about the things that really matter to people.

They have toured local Lloyds Bank branches across the country and created discussion on social media.

Crucially, they have served as a reminder that objects are more than the sum of their parts – for this reason, they are worth protecting.

So, what did we learn from the experience?

Consider how you can talk differently to your customers to better capture their attention. Don’t stifle your creativity during brainstorming sessions, but let it have free rein, scaling back later if needed. Create campaigns that reflect the real-life experiences of your customers and bring home the relevance and value of what you’re offering to their everyday lives.